Calling All You Angels
by oldandnewfirm
Summary: For Chance, having a guardian angel might be a little less terrifying if the angel in question wasn't also his best friend. This is a series of ficlets and snapshots detailing the many ways in which Chance's life has just gotten a whole lot stranger.
1. Illumination

Five against one were pretty good odds where Junior was concerned, but that was before the prongs of a taser had lodged just inside his collar (lucky shot, you bastard) and dropped him writhing to the floor. The guards didn't waste time after that.

But that was then, and this was an eternity later. The world behind Junior's eyelids was lit by star bursts of pain, but even those were fading now, receding into the thick, dark silence that had encroached as the beating continued. God, he was tired. No. He should move. He should fight, should do...something. But. It was so much easier, this. Just lying here, eyes closed, listening to the guards' strained grunts turn to barks of confusion, to sharp cries of surprise.

"Who the hell are you?" Someone asked.

There was a noise like Styrofoam rubbing together in the mouthpiece of a bullhorn, then Junior's vision washed red as something bright went off above him.

"_A bomb,_" He thought. Thinking hurt, too. Maybe he should stop that.

He did.

* * *

"...A real pain in the ass sometimes, you know that?"

The voice seemed to be coming to him through three feet of cotton. That's about what his head felt like, anyway. Junior made a vague, wet sound and ran his tongue over his lips, then tried to form words and realized that he couldn't get his tongue and his teeth quite in sync.

"Relax, man. It'll come to you."

Watered down irritation and a high note of stress were plain in his voice, but there was amusement there, too. At least Junior's injuries couldn't be that serious, if Guerrero was willing to crack a joke.

"Here." Said Guerrero. The rim of something hard and plastic pressed between Junior's lips. He parted them, and in a moment lukewarm water trickled over his tongue and down his parched throat.

"Better?"

"Mrg."

"Kinda?"

"No," Junior croaked, finally. "I mean- yeah."

Junior licked his lips again. "'S fine. Thanks."

With a little more work he managed to open his eyes. Interesting. Apparently the world had decided to bleed into one grayish-whitish mass while he was out.

"How many fingers, dude?" Guerrero asked.

Junior squinted. "Um. Fou-Thrr...ee?"

Guerrero frowned. "Was that a four or a three?"

"Definitely, maybe, a three. Ow."

The latter emerged as he tried to lift his head from where it was propped on Guerrero's thigh. Guerrero pinned him down with a finger, but didn't stop Junior when he raised a shaky hand to inspect the damage to his skull. His fingers stuck to his hair and came away bloody.

"It's not pretty," Guerrero said, frowning. "But you'll live. Junior, stop poking it."

"It feels weird." Junior said; it reminded him of that tickling sensation he got in his teeth sometimes, only dulled.

"Yeah, well, it's not a pimple, so trying to pop it isn't going to do you any favors."

Guerrero grasped Junior's hand and guided it back to his side.

"Your hand's warm." Junior said. He lolled his head right until he was more or less staring directly up into Guerrero's face. Guerrero peered back at him beneath the rims of his glasses, eyes narrowed slightly.

"Huh?"

"Your hands. They're warm."

"And...?" Guerrero asked.

"No, I mean really warm." Junior's brow furrowed. "Like, hot."

"Uh. Okay, dude. Not sure what to say about that."

And Guerrero did seem a bit pinker than usual. That, or the color of his undershirt was smudging with his skin tone and screwing up Junior's currently questionable powers of perception.

"Hey." He'd have snapped his fingers if he could find the energy to move his arm. "What was that light?"

"What light?"

"Before I passed out, there was this bright light, like a flash bomb. And a really awful noise."

Guerrero was quiet long enough to make Junior wonder if he wasn't slurring through his words again. He started to repeat himself when Guerrero abruptly slid him off his thigh and said, "We've got to get you out of here," then stooped to help haul him to his feet.

There were...shadows on the wall. Granted, Junior's world was still fuzzy at the edges, but those marks definitely hadn't been there when he'd first run into this corridor. Moreover, they were distinctly person-shaped.

"Guerrero, what-"

"Come on."

Junior couldn't do anything but let himself be dragged along, though he did keep staring at the people-shadows until it strained his neck to look at them.

"Seriously man," He said. "What happened while I was out?"

Silence.

Junior's eyes narrowed. "Guerrero."

A sigh.

"It was me."

"What did you do?"

"Incinerated them."

There was a long pause while Junior turned those words over in his mind.

"Okay. How did you incinerate them simultaneously, on the spot, while stand-"

"Because I'm an angel. It's what we do, dude. I mean, not on purpose. We're not supposed to, anyway. But there are definitely benefits to being too glorious for the human eye to behold."

Junior barked out a laugh. It took him a second to realize Guerrero wasn't joining him, and a second longer for him to furrow his brow and squint down at Guerrero's unflinching face.

"You're kidding, right?"

"No. I'm not."

"Um..."

Guerrero raked his free hand through his hair. "Look. Believe me or not, Junior, I don't really care. You asked me what happened, so I told you."

"How could you possibly be an angel? Aren't they supposed to be-" He shook his head. "Innocent? Holy?"

"Supposed to be." Guerrero said. "I'm not."

His jaw twitched, Junior noticed, and there was a hardness to his brow that only ever appeared whenever lines of questioning took turns he disagreed with. On any other occasion Junior would have dropped the subject there, but this was too surreal.

"Guerrero, I really don't get-"

They'd reached the front door of the building, and Guerrero didn't even pause as they passed through it. As in _through_ it, straight through the glass and steel without any mention of keycodes, panic bars, or knobs. There was an ambulance parked outside. A very familiar figure lay prone on a stretcher that was being loaded into it.

"What?" Junior peeped.

"You're gonna be fine, dude. You're not dead, you're just a little...disconnected. Hey, if it makes you feel better, consider all of this a dream."

Guerrero guided him into the stretcher, next to the body. It had to be 'the body,' because Junior knew that if he tried to process what was in front of him with anything more defined than that he'd soon be vacationing in a padded cell.

"Just lie down," Guerrero said. Junior felt the weight of Guerrero's hand between his shoulder blades, pressing gently but firmly, and faced with no other logical options all Junior could do was obey. He clambered onto the stretcher and lined himself up with the body as best he could. He hesitated. He turned to Guerrero again, eyes wide.

Guerrero just smiled and mimed lying on a pillow.

"Go on." He said. "Trust me."

"You owe me an explanation."

"If you remember all of this? Sure."

Junior shook his head. Then he took a deep breath, closed his eyes and started to fall-

* * *

The first thing he heard was the steady _peep, peep, peep_ of an EKG machine. Then, distantly, the hum of an AC.

"About time."

A warm British voice reached Junior from somewhere outside of his field of vision.

"The old man just left," Baptiste said. Junior heard his footsteps as he approached the bedside. In a second he came into view, all smiles despite the worried pinch to his eyes. "He'll be back in a half-hour or so. He'll be sorry to see that he missed your glorious reawakening."

"Glorious." Junior swallowed. Squeezed his eyes shut. Something niggled at the part of his mind that wasn't over saturated with painkillers.

"Where's Guerrero?"

"Guerrero? Hell if I know. He left about a week ago, remember?"

He had, Junior realized. As soon as they'd finished the job in Rio, Guerrero had informed them that he'd been hired by a corporate client and promptly jetted off for the far flung parts of who-knew-where. Well, the old man knew, of course, and Junior could find out too if he could just remember why he cared so much.

"Maybe the brain damage was worse than we thought." Junior could tell Baptiste was only half joking.

"No, I'm fine. I'm just..."

"Rest, mate." Baptiste said, and clapped him gently on the shoulder. " Don't worry about work. Just focus on recovering, yeah?"

Junior coughed. "Mhm. Yeah."

"Tell you what, I'll go get you some water. You sound parched."

"Baptiste!"

He stopped, then came back into view. "Yeah?"

"Was it you that pulled me out of the warehouse?"

"Yes."

"Was there anything...unusual, about it?"

"What do you mean?"

"Was there anything strange on the walls?"

"The walls? Ah! You mean that weird silhouette mural? Didn't really go with the decor, did it? I thought it was a bit tasteless myself, but what do I know about art?"

Junior nodded a little, and managed to twitch the un-swollen corner of his mouth into something like a smile.

"I'll be back in a minute, mate." Baptiste said, and he stepped out, leaving Junior to stare at the speckled tile above and wonder.


	2. Etiquette

"But they're real?" Winston said, and without waiting for an answer he grabbed a fistful of Guerrero's wing feathers.

"OW! Winston-"

"Sorry, sorry." Winston released him, though with obvious reluctance.

"Yeah, they're real. They're attached too, in case you hadn't noticed." Guerrero flicked his wing out, half in annoyance and half to shake off the pain, and was pleased to see Winston jump and retreat several paces.

"Look man." Winston held out his hands as though warding him off. "I'm sorry, but this is a lot to take in."

"Yeah, well, there's a reason I wasn't planning on telling you. Unfortunately, circumstances didn't give me much choice."

He scraped his thumb over the bandages binding his right wing to his torso. The wing wasn't broken, thank god, but a bullet that wasn't well aimed so much as damn lucky blew a hole through one of his primary flight muscles. It hurt to think about it, further less move it.

"So...will it heal?" Winston asked, edging closer again to the examination table where Guerrero perched.

"In about three weeks. At least, that's when I can start stretching it out again." He shrugged. "I don't fly much anyway, so it's not a big deal. Unless you're planning on falling off another building ledge in the near future."

Winston's expression darted between annoyed and abashed, but he just screwed up his lips and said nothing. He stopped next to Guerrero's uninjured wing, and soon regarded it with the same wide-eyed fascination he'd worn for the last six hours or so.

Guerrero watched, eyes narrowed, as Winston's hand drifted forward.

"Dude, do that again and I _will _hurt you."


	3. Reunion

"For a guardian angel, you sure kicked my ass back there."

Guerrero just looked at him over the top of his newspaper. He seemed so comfortable on Chance's sofa, with his feet kicked up on the coffee table and his fingers curled through the handle of a steaming mug of Lipton tea (and where he'd found the tea bag in the apartment's barren cupboards Chance had no idea; based on his knack for procuring some at the oddest moments, Chance was starting to suspect that Guerrero carried around the accoutrements for a full tea service at all times. Prepared for any emergency indeed) that it was easy to forget this was the first time they'd seen each other in almost two years.

"Didn't we go over this already?" Guerrero said mildly. He held up a finger. "One: I'm not your guardian angel. I'm just _an_ angel. Hauling you out of mortal peril is a personal choice contingent on my interest and availability, not an obligation. Two: Even if I _was _your guardian angel, the job's to save your life, not to save you from yourself, and that includes saving you from the consequences of your bad decisions."

"Like Katherine?" Chance asked quietly.

"Like getting into a fight with me."

A beat. Guerrero's tongue flicked over his lips.

"I am sorry about how everything worked out." Guerrero said.

"Yeah." There wasn't much more to say about it at this point.

"He'll turn up again sometime."

"Who? Joubert?"

"No. Well yes, him too eventually I guess, but I meant Baptiste."

"Do you know where he is?"

Guerrero held up another finger. "Three: Angelic powers do not equal omnipotence-"

"I didn't mean like that." Chance said, rolling his eyes. "I meant did you happen to find out where he went before you...left."

The idea still sat as strangely on Chance's tongue as it did in his mind. Not as much _as holy crap, Guerrero's an angel_, but enough that Guerrero must have read his doubt on his face.

"Look, dude, fact is I've known you were holing up here for a while now. If I was going to sell you out-"

"-you'd have done it by now. The question is why didn't you? Unless you thought you had something to gain by keeping me in your back pocket."

Something flashed across Guerrero's face- Disappointment? Hurt?- and was gone almost before Chance had time to register it.

"Guess you could say I've grown disenchanted with the status quo." Guerrero said. "And you seem to be doing pretty well for yourself with all of this. Figure it's worth a shot."

Silence crept between them, regulated by the steady ticking of the wall clock. Chance regarded Guerrero carefully, and Guerrero in turn neither shied away from nor showed any real response to the scrutiny other than to meet Chance's gaze with an even one of his own.

"All right." Chance said, finally. "I'll introduce you to my partner. He's a good guy. Name's-"

"Laverne Winston. Ex-cop, divorced, lives in Emeryville."

"-And I'm not surprised you already know that."

"Dude. It's me. He's coming over in about an hour, right?"

Chance frowned. "How did you know _that?_"

"You been giving him tips on network security?"

"Yeah..."

"Try telling him that a Blackberry really isn't the best thing to use as a day planner, particularly if he's dumb enough to pencil in secure information."

Chance winced. "How long?"

"'Bout six months."

"Yikes."

"See? You need me."

"I thought you weren't here to save me from myself?" Chance teased.

"When I'm getting paid for it? Different matter entirely."

For the first time in a long time, they shared a grin.


End file.
